“Has anyone seen Will?” I ask.
“I’ve tried to call him a few times, but he ignores it,” says Carmel.
“I’m going to have to get in his face,” I say regretfully. “I like Will, and I know how pissed off he must be. But he can’t keep my dad’s knife. There’s no way.”
The bell rings for the start of third period. The halls have emptied without us noticing and all of a sudden our voices are loud. We can’t just stand here in a cluster; sooner or later some overzealous hall monitor will chase us down. But all Thomas and I have is study hall, and I don’t feel like going.
“Wanna ditch out?” he asks, reading my mind—or maybe just being an average teenager with good ideas.
“Definitely. What about you, Carmel?”
She shrugs and tugs her cream-colored cardigan tighter around her shoulders. “I’ve got algebra, but who needs that anyway? Besides, I haven’t missed a single class yet.”
“Cool. Let’s go grab something to eat.”
“Sushi Bowl?” Thomas suggests.
“Pizza,” Carmel and I say together, and he grins. As we walk down the hall, I feel relieved. In less than a minute, we’ll be out of this school and into the chilly November air, and anyone who tries to stop us is getting flown the bird.
And then someone taps my shoulder.
“Hey.”
When I turn all I see is a fist in my face—that is, until I feel the multicolored dull sting you get when someone hits you square in the nose. I double over and shut my eyes. There’s warm, sticky wetness on my lips. My nose is bleeding.
“Will, what are you doing?” I hear Carmel shout, and then Thomas joins in and Chase starts grunting. There are sounds of a scuffle.
“Don’t defend him,” Will says. “Didn’t you watch the news? He got someone killed.”
I open my eyes. Will is glaring at me over Thomas’s shoulder. Chase is ready to jump at me, all blond spiky hair and muscle t-shirt, just aching to give Thomas a shove as soon as his designated leader gives him the go-ahead.
“It wasn’t her.” I sniff blood down the back of my throat. It’s salty and tastes like old pennies. Wiping at my nose with the back of my hand leaves a bright red swatch.
“It wasn’t her,” he scoffs. “Didn’t you listen to the witnesses? They said they heard wailing, and growling, but from a human throat. They said they heard a voice speaking that didn’t sound human at all. They said the body was in six pieces. Sound like anyone you know?”
“Sounds like lots of someones,” I snarl. “Sounds like any dime-store psycho.” Except that it doesn’t. And the voice speaking without sounding human makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“You’re so blind,” he says. “This is your fault. Ever since you came here. Mike, and now this poor schlub in the park.” He stops, reaches into his jacket, and pulls out my knife. He points it at me, an accusation. “Do your job!”
Is he an idiot? He must be unhinged, pulling it out in the middle of school. It’s going to get confiscated and he’s going to get signed up for weekly counselor visits or expelled, and then I’m going to have to break into god knows where to get it back.
“Give it to me,” I say. I sound strange; my nose has stopped bleeding but I can feel the clot in there. If I breathe through it to talk normally, I’ll swallow it down and the whole thing will start over.
“Why?” Will asks. “You don’t use it. So maybe I’ll use it.” He holds the knife out at Thomas. “What do you think happens if I cut someone alive? Does it send them to the same place it sends the dead ones?”
“You get away from him,” Carmel hisses. She slides herself between Thomas and the knife.
“Carmel!” Thomas pulls her back a step.
“Loyal to him now, huh?” Will asks, and curls his lip like he’s never seen anything more disgusting. “When you were never loyal to Mike.”
I don’t like where this is going. The truth is, I don’t know what would happen if the athame was used on a living person. To my knowledge, it never has been. I don’t want to think of the wound it might cause, that it might stretch Thomas’s skin up over his face and leave a black hole in its wake. I have to do something, and sometimes that means being an asshole.
“Mike was a dick,” I say loudly. It shocks Will into stillness, which is what I intended. “He didn’t deserve loyalty. Not Carmel’s, and not yours.”
All his attention is on me now. The blade shines brightly under the school’s fluorescent lights. I don’t want my skin to stretch up over my face either, but I’m curious. I wonder if my link to the knife, my blood right to wield it, would protect me somehow. The probabilities weigh out in my head. Should I rush him? Should I wrestle it away?
But instead of looking pissed, Will grins.
“I’m going to kill her, you know,” he says. “Your sweet little Anna.”
My sweet little Anna. Am I that transparent? Was it obvious, the whole time, to everyone but me?
“She’s not weak anymore, you idiot,” I spit. “You won’t get within six feet of her, magical knife or no magical knife.”
“We’ll see,” he replies, and my heart sinks as I watch my athame, my father’s athame, disappear back inside the dark of his jacket. More than anything, I want to rush him, but I can’t risk someone getting hurt. To emphasize the point, Thomas and Carmel come and stand by my shoulders, ready to hold me back.
“Not here,” Thomas says. “We’ll get it back, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.”
“We’d better do it fast,” I say, because I don’t know whether I was telling the truth just now. Anna’s got it in her head that she’s supposed to die. She might just let Will in her front door to spare me the pain of doing it myself.
* * *
We decide to scrap the pizza. In fact, we decide to scrap the rest of the school day, and head instead for my place. I’ve turned Thomas and Carmel into a right fine pair of delinquents. On the way over, I ride with Thomas in his Tempo while Carmel follows behind.
“So,” he says, then stops and chews his lip. I wait for the rest, but he starts to fidget with the sleeves of his gray hoodie, which are a little too long and are starting to fray at the edges.
“You know about Anna,” I say to make it easy on him. “You know how I feel about her.”
Thomas nods.
I run my fingers through my hair but it falls right back into my eyes. “Is it because I can’t stop thinking about her?” I ask. “Or can you really hear what’s going on in my head?”
Thomas purses his lips. “It wasn’t either of those things. I’ve been trying to stay out of your head since you asked me to. Because we’re—” He pauses and looks sort of like a sheep, all lip-chewy and lashy-eyed.
“Because we’re friends,” I say, and shove him in the arm. “You can say it, man. We are friends. You’re probably my best friend. You and Carmel.”
“Yeah,” Thomas says. We must both be wearing the same expression: a little embarrassed, but glad. He clears his throat. “So, anyway. I knew about you and Anna because of the energy. Because of the aura.”
“The aura?”
“It’s not just a mystic thing. Probably most people can pick up on it. But I can see it more clearly. At first I thought it was just the way you were with all of the ghosts. You’d get this excited sort of glow whenever you were talking about her, or especially when you were near the house. But now it’s on you all the time.”
I smile quietly. She is with me all the time. I feel stupid now, for not seeing it sooner. But hey, at least we’ll have this strange story to tell, love and death and blood and daddy-issues. And holy crap, I am a psychiatrist’s wet dream.
Thomas pulls his car into my driveway. Carmel, only a few seconds behind us, catches up at the front door.
“Just chuck your stuff anywhere,” I say as we go in. We shed our jackets and toss our book bags on the sofa. The pitter-patter of dark little feet announces Tybalt’s arrival, and he climbs up Carmel’s th
igh to be held and petted. Thomas gives him a glare, but Carmel scoops the four-legged little flirt right up.
I lead them into the kitchen and they sit down at our rounded oak table. I duck into the refrigerator.
“There are frozen pizzas, or there’s a lot of lunch meat and cheese in here. I could make some hoagie melts in the oven.”
“Hoagie melts,” Thomas and Carmel agree. There’s a brief moment of smiling and blushing. I mutter under my breath about auras starting to glow, and Thomas grabs the dish towel off the counter and throws it at me. About twenty minutes later we’re munching on some pretty excellent hoagie melts, and the steam from mine seems to be loosening up the old blood still stuck up my nose.
“Is this leaving a bruise?” I ask.
Thomas peers at me. “Nah,” he says. “Will can’t hit for beans, I guess.”
“Good,” I reply. “My mom’s getting seriously tired of doctoring me. I think she’s done more healing spells on this trip than our last twelve trips combined.”
“This was different for you, wasn’t it?” Carmel asks between bites of chicken and Monterey Jack. “Anna really knocked you for a loop.”
I nod. “Anna, and you, and Thomas. I’ve never faced anything like her. And I’ve never had to ask civilians to come take care of a haunting with me.”
“I think it’s a sign,” Thomas says with his mouth full. “I think it means you should stay. Give the ghosts a rest for a little bit.”
I take a deep breath. This is probably the only time in my life that I could be tempted by that. I remember being younger, before my dad was killed, and thinking that it might be nice if he gave it up for a while. That it might be nice to stay in one place, and make some friends, and have him just play baseball with me on a Saturday afternoon instead of being on the phone with some occultist or burying his nose in some old moldy book. But all kids feel that way about their parents and their jobs, not just the ones whose parents are ghost hunters.
Now I’m having that feeling again. It would be nice to stay in this house. It’s cozy and it has a nice kitchen. And it would be cool to be able to hang out with Carmel and Thomas, and Anna. We could graduate together, maybe go to college near each other. It’d be almost normal. Just me, my best friends, and my dead girl.
The idea is so ridiculous that I snort.
“What?” Thomas asks.
“There’s nobody else to do what I do,” I reply. “Even if Anna isn’t killing anymore, other ghosts are. I need to get my knife back. And I’m going to have to get back to work, eventually.”
Thomas looks crestfallen. Carmel clears her throat.
“So, how do we get the knife back?” she asks.
“He’s obviously in no mood to just hand it over,” Thomas says sulkily.
“You know, my parents are friends with his parents,” Carmel suggests. “I could ask them to lean on them, you know, tell them that Will stole some big family heirloom. It wouldn’t be lying.”
“I don’t want to answer that many questions about why my big family heirloom is a deadly looking knife,” I say. “Besides, I don’t think parents are enough pressure this time. We’re going to have to steal it.”
“Break in and steal it?” Thomas asks. “You’re nuts.”
“Not that nuts.” Carmel shrugs. “I’ve got a key to his house. My parents are friends with his, remember? We’ve got keys to each other’s houses in case somebody gets locked out, or a key gets lost, or somebody needs to check in while the other is out of town.”
“How quaint,” I say, and she smirks.
“My parents have keys for half the neighborhood. Everyone is just dying to exchange with us. But Will’s family is the only one with a copy of ours.” She shrugs again. “Sometimes it pays to have a whole city up your butt. Mostly it’s just annoying.”
Of course Thomas and I have no idea what she means. We’ve grown up with weird witch parents. People wouldn’t exchange keys with us in a million years.
“So when do we do it?” Thomas asks.
“ASAP,” I say. “Sometime when no one’s there. During the day. Early, right after he leaves for school.”
“But he’ll probably have the knife on him,” Thomas says.
Carmel pulls her phone out. “I’ll start a rumor that he’s been carrying a knife around school and someone should report him. He’ll hear about it before morning and play it safe.”
“Unless he decides to just stay home,” Thomas says.
I give him a look. “Have you ever heard the term ‘Doubting Thomas’?”
“Doesn’t apply,” he replies smugly. “That refers to someone being skeptical. I’m not skeptical. I’m pessimistic.”
“Thomas,” Carmel croons. “I never knew you were such a brain.” Her fingers work feverishly at her phone keypad. She’s already sent three messages and gotten two back.
“Enough, you two,” I say. “We’re going in tomorrow morning. I guess we’ll miss first and second period, probably.”
“That’s okay,” Carmel says. “Those were the two periods we made it to today.”
* * *
Morning finds me and Thomas huddled down in his Tempo, parked around the corner from Will’s house. We’ve got our heads pulled low inside of our hooded sweatshirts and our eyes are shifty. We look exactly like you’d expect someone to look if they were minutes away from committing a major crime.
Will lives in one of the wealthier, more well-preserved areas of the city. Of course he does. His parents are friends with Carmel’s. That’s how I have a copy of his house keys jangling around in my front pocket. But unfortunately that means there might be lots of busybody wives or housekeepers peeking out of windows to see what we’re up to.
“Is it time?” Thomas asks. “What time is it?”
“It isn’t time,” I say, trying to sound calm, like I’ve done this a million times. Which I haven’t. “Carmel hasn’t called yet.”
He calms down for a second and takes a deep breath. Then he tenses and ducks behind the steering wheel.
“I think I saw a gardener!” he hisses.
I haul him back up by his hood. “Not likely. The gardens have all gone brown by now. Maybe it was someone raking leaves. Either way, we’re not sitting here in ski masks and gloves. We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Not yet.”
“Well, don’t act suspicious.”
It’s just the two of us. Between the time of the plan hatching and the time of the plan execution, we decided that Carmel would be our plant. She’d go to school and make sure that Will was there. According to her, his parents leave for work long before he leaves for school.
Carmel objected, saying we were being sexist, that she should be there in case something went wrong, because at least she’d have a reasonable excuse to be dropping by. Thomas wouldn’t hear of it. He was trying to be protective, but watching him bite his lower lip and jump at every tiny movement, I think I might’ve been better off with Carmel. When my phone starts vibrating, he jerks like a startled cat.
“It’s Carmel,” I tell him as I pick up.
“He’s not here,” she says in a panicked whisper.
“What?”
“Neither of them are. Chase is gone too.”
“What?” I ask again, but I heard what she said. Thomas is tugging on my sleeve like an eager elementary schooler. “They didn’t go to school,” I snap.
Thunder Bay must be cursed. Nothing goes right in this stupid town. And now I’ve got Carmel worrying in my ear and Thomas conjecturing in my other ear and there are just too many damn people in this car for me to think straight.
“What do we do now?” they ask at the same time.
Anna. What about Anna? Will has the athame, and if he got wind of Carmel’s decoy texting trick, who knows what he might have decided to do. He’s smart enough to pull a double cross; I know that he is. And, for the last few weeks at least, I’ve been dumb enough to fall for one. He could be laughing at us right now, picturing us r
ansacking his room while he walks up Anna’s driveway with my knife and his blond lackey in tow.
“Drive,” I growl, and hang up on Carmel. We’ve got to get to Anna, and fast. For all I know, I might already be too late.
“Where?” Thomas asks, but he’s got the car started and is pulling around the block, toward the front of Will’s house.
“Anna’s.”
“You don’t think…” Thomas starts. “Maybe they just stayed home. Maybe they’re going to school and they’re just late.”
He keeps on talking but my eyes notice something else as we pass by Will’s house. There’s something wrong with the curtains in a room on the second floor. It isn’t just that they’re drawn when every other window is clear and open. It’s something about the way that they’re drawn. They seem … messy, somehow. Like they were thrown together.
“Stop,” I say. “Park the car.”
“What’s going on?” Thomas asks, but I keep my eyes trained on the second-floor window. He’s in there, I know he is, and all of a sudden I’m mad as hell. Enough of this bullshit. I’m going in there and I’m getting my knife back and Will Rosenberg had better get out of my way.
I’m out before the car even stops. Thomas scrambles behind me, fumbling with his seatbelt. It sounds like he half falls out of the driver’s side door, but his familiar clumsy footfalls catch up and he starts asking a million questions.
“What are we doing? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get my knife back,” I reply. We haul ass up the driveway and bound up the porch steps. I shove Thomas’s hand away when he goes to knock and use the key instead. I’m in a mood, and I don’t want to give Will any more warning than I have to. Let him try to keep it from me. Let him just try. But Thomas grabs my hands.
“What?” I snap.
“Use these at least,” he says, holding out a pair of gloves. I want to tell him that we aren’t cat-burglarizing anymore, but it’s easier to just put them on than to argue. He puts on a pair himself, and I twist the key in the lock and open the door.
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